UPDATE: Proximity Is Everything

The Prado Makes Room to Show Off More Jewels

Oh my goodness.

h/t, MH.
UPDATE
Speaking of bad juxtapositions, the dead-on Fev notes another, this one involving the weather.

Copy Desk Online

The Ventura County Star's universal copy desk has a public blog. It's an interesting approach--information for deskers and a discussion of tools and standards. If you know of other such public blogs run by desks, let me know and I'll add you to the blogroll. Blogging about what we do is a smart idea. I see my old pal from ACES Patricia Marroquin is involved in this.

MRSA Account

I've been reading an appalling account of MRSA and posted about it here. It's too depressing to post twice. Makes my stitched up hand that I've been whining about seem so trivial

It's Not Just Political Correctness

If you want to read an excellent, crystal-clear piece on the negativity of "illegal" as in "illegal alien," see Lawrence Downes' op-ed in The New York Times today.
You don't have to agree with the people who advocate amnesty or who think there should be an open border--and I don't entirely --to appreciate what Lawrence is saying about language. He puts the word into context of what's legal or not; what other "crimes" are brushed off in our society. This may make you think beyond the matter of political correctness.

Should be required reading for those obsessed with the immigration issue, like Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly or Michelle Malkin. Did I mention Lou Dobbs?

This is just great. Anti-Immigrant Groups Link to Fake CNN Story Claiming Hispanics Started Wildfires

If Plan A Doesn't Work...

When you're taken into captivity, the goal is to maximize control, psychologist advises

Oakland Ross
Middle East Bureau

JERUSALEM–Rocky Abramson's personal bottom line on being taken hostage closely parallels the commonsense attitude that prevails in most sentient parts of the globe.

"Really, you want to avoid it."

That being so, during the course of his four-hour seminar on the hostage experience, the Canadian-born organizational psychologist also examines ways of avoiding the situation entirely.

That would be Plan A.

The bulk of the program, however, is taken up with Plan B – what to do if Plan A fails – and reflects Abramson's opinion that time spent in captivity can, with the right preparation, be rendered less soul-crushing than might otherwise be the case.

It's largely a question of control.

"It won't be a pleasant experience," says Abramson, formerly of Vancouver, who moved to Israel in 1977 and has served with the Israel Defence Forces as a staff psychologist, among other roles. "You're not going to recommend it to your friends. But it doesn't have to be traumatic."

Business Week Takes a Look at Us

Business Week looks at what has happened to the newspaper industry. It’s a rather clear-eyed view, it seems to me.

fyi

nevre try to slice opem a shrink-wrapped package of ham with a large, very,very large lasts-for-life kmife. bad idea. reallyy dumb.

Journalists as Brands

UPDATE: Here's another argument for journalists as brands.


The New York Observer did a piece a few days ago about journalists and their need to create a brand or face irrelevancy. As much as I love blogs and the Internet in general, this idea perplexes me and makes me wonder where it all leads.

As someone who rarely reads bylines—and if I do notice, it’s because something in the tone or a particular phrasing has caught my eye and I want to see if someone whose work I’ve doubted or admired is the author.

That’s also why reporters’ byline strikes always make me laugh and cringe at the same time--does anyone really care?

It does seem to me that we ought to identify ourselves a bit, that having a blog is a good idea for reporters, editors, artists, photographers and so on.

But this leads somewhere. You’re a brand, yes, but one that is more easily a fat, tempting target of bloggers, especially political ones, who will go after you for perceived biases. We’ve already had instances of looney bloggers listing newsmakers’ home phone numbers, seeming to threaten the kids, doing records checks on journalists and others. Is this where we want to go? Or do we want the institution to stand for and by our good work?

Gawker takes a look at the issue, too; make sure you read the comments.

This would seem to merit more attention than it's gotten, and it's an issue that goes well beyond The New York Times and one of its formerly probationary reporters.

Newspaper Sales

A couple of notable ones this week:

Tribune to sell The Advocate/Greenwich Time
Published October 25 2007
Chicago Oct, 25, 2007 - Tribune Publishing, a division of Tribune Company, today announced the sale of its Southern Connecticut Newspapers, The Advocate (Stamford) and Greenwich Time, to Hearst Corporation for $62.4 million. The newspapers will be managed by MediaNews Group, Inc. under an existing joint venture agreement with Hearst.The transaction is expected to close within the next few weeks. It does not include real estate in Stamford and Greenwich, which Tribune plans to sell separately.


and two in Oklahoma:


2 State Newspapers to Be Sold
The Daily Oklahoman
Two of Oklahoma's oldest newspapers -- the Daily Ardmorite and the Shawnee News-Star -- are among 17 newspapers and other properties being sold by Morris Publishing Group to GateHouse Media Inc.

The $115 million sale, subject to a working capital adjustment, will be used by Augusta, Ga.-based Morris Publishing to pay down debt outstanding under its bank credit agreement.

The transaction is expected to close by late November and is subject to approval by regulators and lenders.

Fire Coverage Critiqued

A Los Angeles blog critiques fire coverage, including front-page and headlines.

Rhymes With...Ramone...

This is too funny: A father reveals--sort of--the worst swear word in the world.

Let me add that this word is indeed awful; I consider it the worst word anyone can use. That said, it's a clever piece and made me laugh and laugh.

Watching the Change

I've been overlooking remiss in not noting my friend Maurreen Skowran's interesting web site, News Atoms. Take a look. (Not overlooking, as it is misused to mean "looking over," but failing to mention.)

Meme Mutation

When Fev is involved, we're in trouble. But in this case, we have Language Czarina to thank.

Welcome to the Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme.

I've borrowed The Czarina's language below and added the Homer subgenre. Top that, Meme-ists!

The statements below are all of the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...." Copy the statements into your blog. Before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one statement.
* You can mutate either the genre, the medium, or the subgenre of any one statement. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is..." or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is..." or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...."
* You can add a completely new statement of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...."
* You must have at least one statement in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then complete your possibly mutant set of statements. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed statements generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is Kindred by Octavia Butler
The best scary movie in the monster genre is The Host
The best romantic song in musical theater is "Caravan" from Duke Ellington's Sophisticated Ladies
The best instrumental album in bluegrass is 58957: The Bluegrass Guitar Collection by Tony Rice
The best screwball movie in comedy is His Girl Friday starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell
The best Homer-influenced movie in the comedy genre is O Brother Where Art Thou?, starring George Clooney and Tim Blake Nelson

I am passing this along to:
SquirrelMama

Dictionary Evangelist

Kathy Schenck

John McIntyre

Sree Sreenivasan

Climate Coverage

I'm seeing a lot more environment-related news and products lately, and I don't think it's just because of the heavily promoted CNN special "Planet in Peril," featuring those guys in their tight black t-shirts.

There's a new site, the Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media, well worth your time.

The Affect of a Grammar Trend

This could be a serious trend or just another way of saying "gotcha" to people, but The New York Times finds interest in better grammar, cropping up in 20-somethings. Read past the reference to the elderly friend in the lede to find the age stuff.

The Age of Dissonance
By BOB MORRIS
Not long ago, an elderly friend and grammar stickler stopped me midsentence. I had just said, “They gave it to him and I,” when it should have been “him and me.”

“You have to keep in mind the object of the preposition,” she gently told me.

I felt ashamed, but also grateful to be corrected.

“And now you won’t embarrass yourself in front of someone else,” she said.

She isn’t the only one wagging a finger or a pencil these days. Bring up the topic of grammar at any party and you’re likely to be hit with a tirade.

Around the Blogs

I’ve been meaning to note the arrival of a couple of new bloggers, both ACES members. Kathy Schenck has been offering Words to the Wise for a couple of months. She was Johnny on the spot, noting National Dictionary Day on Tuesday, which, I admit, had escaped my attention, and she makes note of the word of the day feature at her paper, The Journal Sentinel.

And Mark Murphy, copy editor and published author, has just started Murphy’s Craw, which promises “Some whimsical wanderings through the worlds of words, writing, and old movies and TV -- along with selected short subjects.”

Also, Language Hat uncovers some good postings and sites, finding Free Rice, which provides a vocabulary quiz and donates rice, and a good posting about spelling, at OUP.

2nd Update Copy Editors, Pay Attention

Update No.2: Over at Poynter, there's a good discussion going about the former Knight Ridder plan to consolidate desks. Not surprisingly, David Sullivan weighs in with lots of good information, including some questions the folks in Philadelphia had raised.

And ACES comments on its web site.

UPDATED: John McIntyre wrote a response this morning to Lodovic's bright idea, below, and then our friend Forrest Brown added his two cents. Both worthy of your attention.

The always-smart Tim McGuire catches MediaNews president Joseph Lodovic saying something really foolish:

``We have to find ways to grow revenue or become more efficient by eliminating fixed costs,'' Lodovic said. ``Why does every newspaper need copy editors? In this day and age, I think copy-editing can be done centrally for several newspapers.''

Well, where shall we begin? Because we could fill a blog every day with mistakes we see in unedited copy posted to the web? That our reputation as a profession and an industry rests on accuracy? That anyone familiar with a community knows if their local newspaper staff isn't? We know this to be true. Why doesn't an industry executive?

I try to avoid badmouthing people on this blog but this is really foolish. Not shocking as in, who could have seen that coming, but astounding all the same. How much of this idea is rooted in the shortage of copy editors? Or demands for pay parity with reporters? In copy editors' refusal to close their eyes to weak, badly written, poorly sourced stories?

We talked vaguely about this possibility back when we were first forming ACES--what was the logical outcome of the shortage of copy editors? Some thought it was time to demand more money and some succeeded, apparently. Others thought it was time for copy desks to assert their role in the newsroom and, presumably, some did. Others experienced some foreboding, some fear that this plan for regionalizing desks to save money might be the next step.

As MediaNews makes clear, there's no other reason. It's a way of producing carbon copy newspapers, by people unfamiliar with an area.

This is the same kind of thinking that leads us to write endlessly about untalented, self-destructive Hollywood types as if they mattered, thus making ourselves irrelevant to readers. It's the same kind of thinking that allows, even forces, talent and decades of institutional memory out the door and then brags that the loss of dozens, even hundreds, of people won't harm coverage. Or allows the bigmouths of cable "news" to substitute uninformed opinion for reporting, over and over.

This is our leadership? This is our future? Certainly we can and must do better than this.

Shield Law Folo

This gets to the point I make below--protecting whistle-blowers is one thing when contemplating a shield law, though those laws are usually designed for journalists. It's another to hide behind the leakers while anonymously damaging people, which is Valerie Plame's point. And is the fourth graf snarky or what?


Plame Book Criticizes Bush, Journalists
By MATT APUZZO
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose 2003 outing touched off a White House leak scandal, said journalists hid behind the First Amendment after allowing themselves to be exploited by the Bush administration.

Plame writes about the leak, the scandal and the perjury trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in her memoir, "Fair Game — My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House." A copy of the book, which is to be released Tuesday, was purchased by The Associated Press.

She offers harsh words for President Bush, whom she assails for administration "arrogance and intolerance." She also said criticism of her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a "dress rehearsal" for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth effort that impugned Sen. John Kerry's war record during his unsuccessful quest for the presidency in 2004.

Plame often writes from the perspective of spectator to a scandal. She discusses being uncomfortable in the limelight, even as she poses for magazine photographs, attends posh Washington fundraisers and is whisked backstage at a rock concert.

The book represents the first time that Plame has publicly discussed the scandal in detail. After a lengthy trial, an FBI investigation, countless news articles and congressional testimony, however, few revelations were left for Plame's book.

Some of the details Plame had planned to offer, including discussion of her CIA career and her job responsibilities, are redacted in the book. Sometimes that means whole pages of blacked-out text. The CIA objected to the publication of this material and Plame lost a court fight to include them. CIA employees have to clear their writings with the agency.

Syndicated columnist Robert Novak revealed Plame's identity in 2003 in a story about Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger. Wilson said that trip debunked some prewar intelligence about Iraq's nuclear ambitions, yet the intelligence made it into Bush's State of the Union address that year.

Shield Law's Financial Test

Some bloggers who report on politics and other issues but either don't get paid or have other careers apparently wouldn't be covered by the journalists' shield bill just passed by the House.

This is a tough question: I don't think every single person who whips out a video camera and gets into a fracas or even simply writes about an event is automatically a journalist. But I don't think that a financial test is the answer, either.

And the problem with a shield law is this: that which isn't covered specifically by the law is most likely going to be declared illegal. And thus we have a law governing a free press. Bad move.

Strengthen the whistle-blower law (my commenter's view to the contrary); stop using anonymous feeds from the government, of any political persuasion, to attack others and, if a source deliberately lies, then out him. But don't give up your right to print that which, in many cases, shouldn't be classified anyway, to gain some limited protection from the law. In the end, it's not going to be on your side.


From OpenLeft

The House just passed the Free Flow of Information Act, a 'shield law' protecting journalists. Here's the rub.

The bill provides journalists with a qualified privilege as to sources and information, while at the same time, recognizing the need for effective law enforcement and robust national security. A blogger who regularly engages in journalistic activities - such as gathering and publishing news and information for dissemination to the public - and does so for a substantial portion of the person's livelihood or for substantial financial gain would be covered by the shield as a journalist.
I have no opinion as to whether shield laws are a good idea or not, but it's worth noting that this law doesn't cover amateurs, consultants like me, people like Steve Clemons, diarists on Kos, or anyone else who derive most of their income from other sources. I don't understand why 'gathering and publishing news and information for dissemination to the public' isn't a good enough standard.

Here's the list of supporters: Associated Press, the National Association of Broadcasters, Bloomberg News, CBS, ClearChannel, CNN, Cox, Gannett, Hearst, NBC, News Corporation, The New York Times, TIME, and The Washington Post.

All of these groups make their money from advertising. So of course, if you get a substantial amount of advertising you get special protections. Otherwise, not so much.

New Santa Barbara News Site

ACES member Bill Macfadyen is the founder, publisher and CEO of the just-launched Noozhawk.com, a Santa Barbara news site.
Here's what he promises:

We’ve adopted as our platform one written by the late T.M. Storke, the legendary Santa Barbaran and Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper publisher. It contains seven core principles that we enthusiastically support:

1. Keep the news clean and fair.

2. Play no favorites, and never mix business and editorial policy.

3. Do not let the news columns reflect editorial comment.

4. Publish the news that is public property without fear or favor of friend or foe.

5. Accept no charity and ask no favors.

6. Give “value received” for every dollar taken in.

7. Make the publication profitable if possible, but above profit keep it clean, fearless and fair.

Good luck, Bill!

Blogs of Action

It’s Blog Action Day around the ‘Net today and the theme,chosen in August, is the environment. Bloggers and web site owners are encouraged to write about environmental topics, perhaps donate to chosen green charities, etc. It coincides with the Solar Decathalon competition going on in Washington today.

Of equal interest is the fact that all participating blogs are listed in the action day page—more than 15,000 as of this moment. If you’re looking around to see who’s writing what, this is a great place to start. Because of the theme, many are environment-related but by no means are all of them.

Hyphen Hiatus

Well,notahiatus.Actually,they’vebeenbanished.

You get the idea.

A couple of days ago, our esteemed colleague Bill Walsh was fuming about the decision of Copy Editor magazine to change its name to Copyediting. As always, Bill has some choice things to say.

Now there's this: The new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary did away with about 16,000 hyphens.

Russell Smith says:
There are many reasons for this, one of them being that the rules of hyphenation were just silly. The other is, of course, the slow elimination of punctuation that the digital age is necessitating. Electronic communication tends to be more streamlined: We use punctuation less, generally, in e-mails and text messages, and in advertising slogans.

Furthermore, as the editor of the dictionary admitted to a Reuters reporter, the world of letters is increasingly ruled by designers. Type looks so much prettier, so much slicker, when it is not prickly with hyphens. It's easier to lay out words in narrow columns, too, when they are easily separable.

Some of us are not coöperating. Or co:operating. (Remember THAT one?)

Start Making Sense

This is a good piece about SEO—search engine optimization which has indeed freaked out many people I know, with much of the fuss unnecessary.

Not surprisingly, The New York Times, with its knack for sometimes smart, literary references in headlines, keeps popping up in this discussion. The Times kicked off the mainstream conversation with its “This Boring Headline Is Written for Google” article last year.

Debate over how to best capture the attention of search engines has led people to think that creativity is dead, that plodding headlines focusing only on the basic facts will do.

But those heads have always been written that way. We have always had headlines that take up the basic facts and little more. Back in the 1980s, while working on a New York City tab, we jokingly compiled a list of heads we expected we’d need every day in the back of the book:

Man Stabbed in Subway
Woman Mugged in the Bronx
Police Raid Nets Drugs
Mayor Blasts Media
Fire Leaves Families Homeless
Pileup Snarls Traffic
Man Accused of Selling Crack

I’m not arguing for these kinds of boring, trite headlines, just that much of our work, though certainly not all, is already search-engine friendly and we’re working up a sweat over a not-so-big issue.

But it’s the more feature-y pieces, those with a more nuanced story to tell, that have editors worried that their creativity will be stifled. I argue that it’s just a matter of being smart and using the technology, rather than letting it run you.

We are once again arguing against a fait accompli: search-engine technology is going to govern some things we do. We must adapt and make it work to our advantage, not simply whine and complain about something no one outside the business really understands, let alone cares about.

Off Topic But Worth a Read

Some people can't catch a break; maybe others can help out.

From First Draft:

Two weeks ago I posted about the Joseph family who lost their Lower 9th Ward home for the second time. Kellie Joseph and her 6 children lost their home to Katrina. The rebuilding of their home was nearly complete when it was tragically destroyed by a fire after someone abandoned a stolen car in their backyard and lit it aflame to destroy evidence. The flames engulfed the home.

A group of Tulane medical students who heard of this devastating news decided to help the family rebuild again and started a website called Hope in Grace for what is called Project: Bring Miracle. Recently the students contacted me. The online donation effort has reached a standstill after some initial local media attention. It is their hope to reach a wider audience through the Internet.

Here is where we can help. We as individuals and bloggers can not rebuild the great city of New Orleans but perhaps we can help to rebuild the home of one family that has now fallen through the cracks. The family had invested their Road Home grant of $138,000 to rebuild their home. That is now lost. Unfortunately the maximum they can receive from their insurance to rebuild their home a second time is $12,000. At this point, after donations and insurance, $132,000 is needed to rebuild the Joseph's family home. Donations can be made online to a rebuilding fund specifically restricted for use only in reconstruction.

Keeping You Regular

Tracking the evolution of language
Researchers discover that irregular verbs change in a predictable manner -- just like genes and living organisms.

By Denise Gellene
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Tracing the evolution of English verbs over 1,200 years -- from the Old English of "Beowulf" to the modern English of "The Princess Diaries" -- researchers have found that the majority of irregular verbs are going the way of Grendel, falling to the linguistic equivalent of natural selection.

The irregular verbs, governed by confusing and antiquated rules, came under evolutionary pressure to obey the modern "-ed" rule of regular verb conjugation, according to a report today in the journal Nature.

That the English language has undergone dramatic change over a millennium will come as no surprise to generations of high school students who have struggled to decipher "Beowulf," which dates to the 9th century, or Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," written about 1200.

Linguists have constructed elaborate "family trees" showing how English has developed over time but have been unable to detect the principle driving irregular verbs toward regularity.

The researchers, led by Martin A. Nowak, an evolutionary theorist at Harvard University, discovered that irregular verbs evolve in a predictable manner -- just like genes and living organisms. Analyzing databases containing millions of words, Nowak and colleagues showed that the patterns of change depended on how often irregular verb forms were used.

No Comment

Journalists' murderer is executed

The man convicted of murdering four journalists in Afghanistan in 2001 was among 15 prisoners executed in Afghanistan on Sunday. Reza Khan was sentenced to death in November 2004 after he was found guilty of killing El Mundo reporter Julio Fuentes, Italian journalist María Grazia Cutuli, Australian cameraman Harry Burton, and Afghan photographer Azizullah Haidari, who worked for Reuters.

Word Fun

Kathy Schenck over at her excellent new blog, Words to the Wise, notes the fun possibilities of the Word Cup. It really does look like a blast.

No Comment

Journalists' murderer is executed

The man convicted of murdering four journalists in Afghanistan in 2001 was among 15 prisoners executed in Afghanistan on Sunday. Reza Khan was sentenced to death in November 2004 after he was found guilty of killing El Mundo reporter Julio Fuentes, Italian journalist María Grazia Cutuli, Australian cameraman Harry Burton, and Afghan photographer Azizullah Haidari, who worked for Reuters.

National Newspaper Week

It's National Newspaper Week and the Centre Daily Times finds reason for celebration.

It would be interesting to quiz the kids who say they read newspapers and find out how much they've retained. Ditto for older readers.

Embedding the News

Mark Thoma thinks newspapers should sell their content, i.e., stories, by embedding them with targeted ads to blogs and other websites.

The most immediate objection is to embedding ads to match the content. Some newspapers are already doing that, of course, but I don't know what longterm effect that might have on the reporting of certain stories--say, investigations of politicians--that might not lend themselves to ads.

Make sure you read the comments. There are several good thoughts there.

Burma Checks the Web

If this is true, it might be time for a little restraint. And maybe some dismantling of web sites and their archives. Temporarily, that is.

Myanmar turns cameras on dissidents
By Richard Ehrlich

BANGKOK - Myanmar is apparently using photos sent to websites, television stations and other media to arrest protesters, while at the same time praising China's 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown which turned foreign news videos into virtual wanted posters to capture dissidents.

Myanmar security forces have detained over 2,000 people in the wake of last week's popular unrest and military crackdown. The authorities claim to have already released over 680 of those detained, but there are new reports of continued arrests. "Residents say military trucks patrol neighborhood streets during the night with loudspeakers broadcasting warnings: 'We have photographs. We are going to make arrests'," the Thailand-based, Irrawaddy magazine and other news organizations reported on Wednesday.

Confiscating Tape in Iraq

Josh Marshall and friends are all over this story.

Yesterday we noted the AP story that said that US military personnel had confiscated videotape that an AP reporter had taken at the scene of the bombing in which the Polish Ambassador was injured. Allegedly they were enforcing an Iraqi law banning coverage of the aftermath of such events.
That seemed pretty odd. How does the US military get involved enforcing an Iraqi law banning press coverage?
TPMmuckraker's Spencer Ackerman got on the case. And after first being told by US military representatives that they didn't know anything about such a confiscation, he eventually learned that not only had the videotape been confiscated but that the reporter had also been temporarily taken into custody. There's still no explanation of why US forces are enforcing this law. And they still appear to be refusing to give the tape back. Here's our report. And we're continuing to look for more answers.

Off Topic

It's not really the same situation but for some reason, this reminds me of the time I threw a pencil at a colleague across the newsroom and stuck him--yes, stuck him--in the forehead.

Burma vs. Myanmar

The BBC explains the reason for sticking with the name Burma.

Far Outliers has another take. I second the complaint about pronunciation--I'm hearing TV people say "Myanmar" two or three different ways in the same report.

The Boston Globe weighs in.

Who Needs All Those Readers?

The NYT has an excellent point about circulation declines. Guess what? It's not just that fewer people want to read papers.

Why Big Newspapers Applaud Some Declines in Circulation

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
As the newspaper industry bemoans falling circulation, major papers around the country have a surprising attitude toward a lot of potential readers: Don’t bother.
Big American newspapers sell about 10 percent fewer copies today than they did in 2000.
The big American newspapers sell about 10 percent fewer copies than they did in 2000, and while the migration of readers to the Web is usually blamed for that decline, much of it has been intentional. Driven by marketing and delivery costs and pressure from advertisers, many papers have decided certain readers are not worth the expense involved in finding, serving and keeping them.

“It’s a rational business decision of newspapers focusing on quality circulation rather than quantity, shedding the subscribers who cost more and generate less revenue,” said Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm.

That rational business decision is being driven in part by advertisers, who have changed their own attitudes toward circulation.

In the boom years, “there was more willingness by advertisers to assign some value to the occasional reader, the student, the reader who doesn’t match a certain profile,” said Jason E. Klein, chief executive of the Newspaper National Network, a marketing alliance.

But advertisers have become more cost-conscious and have learned how to reach narrowly tailored audiences on the Internet. Sponsors of preprinted ads that are inserted into a newspaper have been especially aggressive in telling papers that some circulation just is not worthwhile.